Hacker News Reader

Comment by natnat | Hacker News Reader

In what world is the US education worse-than-third-world? The US has universal literacy, phenomenal higher education institutions, and primary and secondary schools that are comparable to peer countries on average.

We spend lots of money on schools in the US and generally get pretty good outcomes. Our math scores leave something to be desired, but average reading scores are better than peer countries. There are plenty of exceptions, especially in poor neighborhoods, and chronic absenteeism is a real problem, but it's worth keeping sight of the fact that the vast majority of American schools are quite good.

Some examples:

* PISA scores: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/OECD_2022_PISA_Results_Comparing%2...

* PIRLS/TIMMS scores: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1

View on HN

Per your first link, the US is below the OECD average with a -13 delta from 2018

That section is just for mathematics, which the commenter specifically called out. The reading and science are above average

Above average seems like a low bar if the US wants to stay the top economy.

Particularly so given how "wealthy" the US is.

I'm not trying to say that the US educational performance is great, just that it's not terrible. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a narrative that US schools are failing horribly and that just isn't true.

Wouldn't you agree that "failing" is relative? Given just how much money the US has, wouldn't you agree that we should expect better outcomes? Wouldn't it be a failure that despite our massive wealth, we are below OECD average in any subject?

That is a _huge_ shift of the goalpost from "US is worse than third world countries"

Wildly shifting goal posts from “worse than third world” to “above average isn’t good enough”

For math. Above average in reading and science.

There's also the matter of picking a definition for third world.

Does OECD include third world?

The PISA scores are below average in 2022 but not significantly so. Most countries have had a pretty bad decline in test scores due to covid, but that's (hopefully) a one-time problem and future cohorts will do better.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. We're a very rich country and we should do better.

But the US also has a lot of systematic problems that peer countries don't, like child poverty, that are likely a bigger cause of subpar test scores than bad schools.

There's a difference between "below average and rising" versus "below average and falling". The US, over this period, happens to be the latter: below average and falling.

Merely focusing on "below average" without acknowledging the trend -- declining -- seems to be disingenuous.

National averages are nothing like the areas of the US where a fab would go.

They need immigration to restore the values around education and work ethic. I hope we stay at it long enough to make these places great again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com